Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WASHINGTON--The chairman of the presidential Challenger commission bluntly denounced NASA yesterday for a "clearly flawed" decision-making process, after hearing of a second instance in which the space agency brushed aside contractor fears for the safety of the shuttle and crew...
Nearly everyone, including the space agency, seemed to be zeroing in on a failure of the right booster rocket, probably at its bottom joint, as the event that initiated the tragedy. The puff of black smoke seen in the NASA photographs and videotape lends support to theories that an O ring was at fault. According to a flight "time-line" compiled by NASA and released at week's end the smoke first appeared .445 seconds after booster ignition. It swirled between the rocket and the external tank, near where the fatal burnthrough seems to have occurred. One solid-rocket specialist...
...NASA's Mulloy conceded that the rings start to lose their resiliency at a temperature of 50 degrees F. But despite some reservations expressed the day before the tragedy by booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol, Mulloy said, NASA technicians had concluded (and Thiokol experts concurred) that the seals would work. Mulloy later volunteered that even if the primary O ring failed, the backup ring "would seat as it has done in the past, even under those temperature conditions...
Mulloy's statement seemed at odds with a 1982 NASA report. The document concluded that because of shifting motions in the boosters at launch, the secondary O rings might not seat properly. But NASA decided that the shuttle could keep flying without an assured backup, knowing that the consequences of failure, in the agency's own words, could be "loss of mission, vehicle and crew...
...week's end, as NASA continued to maintain a stiff upper lip about both the rocket's defects and the shuttle's future, Rogers issued a terse but devastating statement: he had advised the President that after only one week of hearings, the commission "has found that the process (of decision making leading up to Challenger's launch) may have been flawed." As a result, NASA was being asked to exclude those of its personnel involved in the launch from any further role on the investigating teams...